Garden of the Phoenix: Non-profit Case Study

Garden of the Phoenix Foundation with Project 120
Tourism
Creative
Technology

THE SETUP

A story nobody knew and everybody is connected to

Project 120 is a public-private partnership formed in 2013 to revitalize Chicago’s South Parks. Their premise is that public parks are a shared commonwealth, and their work respects and renews the character Frederick Law Olmsted designed into them.

Their focus turned to the Garden of the Phoenix in Jackson Park. The pavilion built there for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition marked Japan’s cultural introduction to the western world and shaped Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style, which makes it one of the more consequential structures in American architecture.

Almost nobody in Chicago knew that.

Project 120 needed the story told well enough to build public and corporate support for reinvestment in the South Parks. That meant taking 130 years of park history, set inside 170 years of relations between the United States and Japan, and making it something people would actually sit with.

The content existed. It was scattered across more than five sources in different formats, with no structure and no hierarchy.

THE SOLUTION

We built a digital timeline carrying a full library of historical material, including photographs, images, video, and articles. The intent was a site that works the way the garden itself does, meaning something you move through and find things in rather than read straight down.

Getting there was a content problem before it was a design problem.

Build highlights include:

An interactive digital timeline spanning the full history
A content library of photographs, images, video, and articles
Content strategy consolidating material from more than five sources and formats
Design connecting the narrative to the physical space of the park
Social engagement and fundraising support, including Kickstarter and corporate outreach
Collaboration across the City of Chicago, the Chicago Park District, and community and corporate stakeholders

THE STRATEGY

Make the depth navigable

The experience had to be as immersive as the physical garden and still let someone find one specific thing. Those pull against each other. Interactive storytelling tends to trap people in a linear path, and reference content tends to look like a filing cabinet.

We resolved it by treating the timeline as the entry point and the library as the depth underneath, so a casual visitor and a researcher both get what they came for.

Content strategy did the heavy lifting. With material arriving from five or more sources, the work was deciding what mattered, what did not, and what order it belonged in.

We also drew the narrative into the physical space, so the park and the web experience reference each other rather than existing separately. The garden is where the 130-year local story and the 170-year international one meet, and the timeline was built to make that legible.

Stakeholder range was unusual for a project this size. Project 120, the City of Chicago, the Chicago Park District, community groups, and corporate supporters, including OMRON and Robert Karr, whose funding made it possible.

THE RESULTS

Three W3 awards and an ongoing partnership

Gold

W3 Award for Visual Appeal

Silver

W3 Award for Education

Silver

W3 Award for User Experience

What changed:

The experience broke new ground for Project 120 as their first interactive digital storytelling effort
Recognition came in both craft and education categories, which is the harder combination for a history project
The relationship continued into Yoko Ono’s SKYLANDING sculpture, where we built an interactive extension of the work